4 ms·

In your opinion, how many orders of magnitude more difficult is driving than mowing the lawn? I honestly don't have a strong sense of the scale of ability here

by wrsh07 10y ago

In your opinion, how many orders of magnitude more difficult is driving than mowing the lawn? I honestly don't have a strong sense of the scale of ability here.

alkonaut 10y ago
level 3-4 driving maybe just a couple of magnitudes harder (e.g in terms of computing power and the amount of code required). Full autonomous Uber's - so many orders of magnitude that I don't even want to speculate on magnitudes. I'm pretty sceptic so I put "mostly autonomous vehicles" within reach, but "driverless taxi" several decades away. We could make "autonomous safe regions" on the map where the mostly autonomous cars could work well. But we just can't make them work well in the normal world for humans because of the edge cases. The last fraction of a percent of scenarios require humans or something very nearly human. You need to be able to improvise, learn, read half-hidden text on road signs and deduce from context what it means etc. It's not acceptable to just handle 99.9 % of the situations for a driverless car, then you end up with driverless cars stranded everywhere. I think the last step from "mostly autonomous" to "fully autonomous" is comparable to going from an ai recognizing all the objects in the famous funny Obama-scale photo, to having an au explain why it's funny. We don't even fully understand that problem, much less have any idea of how to solve it. http://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-vision/ http://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-visio...
ghaff 10y ago
Mowing a lawn is vastly easier (especially if you ignore the various edge trimming etc. that tends to be part of "mowing the lawn.") There are robot lawnmowers today though they mostly (all?) work by just using a perimeter wire like an electric dog fence which works pretty well for the small lawns these are designed for. They're basically Roombas for your lawn. They're just not very popular. They're (all?) electric which you sort of want in this application. But that means that they typically only mow up to 1/4 acre or so--which isn't a lot of work to do with just a standard mower. And they're expensive ($1K+). So you have an expensive and not very good lawnmower that can only cut lawns that are generally easy to do anyway. And, besides, if you're not very price-sensitive and don't want to cut your lawn, there's no absence of people who will do it for you and do other trimming etc. at the same time. So there's just not a lot of market for the product.

by wrsh07 10y ago

In your opinion, how many orders of magnitude more difficult is driving than mowing the lawn? I honestly don't have a strong sense of the scale of ability here.

alkonaut 10y ago

level 3-4 driving maybe just a couple of magnitudes harder (e.g in terms of computing power and the amount of code required). Full autonomous Uber's - so many orders of magnitude that I don't even want to speculate on magnitudes. I'm pretty sceptic so I put "mostly autonomous vehicles" within reach, but "driverless taxi" several decades away. We could make "autonomous safe regions" on the map where the mostly autonomous cars could work well. But we just can't make them work well in the normal world for humans because of the edge cases. The last fraction of a percent of scenarios require humans or something very nearly human. You need to be able to improvise, learn, read half-hidden text on road signs and deduce from context what it means etc. It's not acceptable to just handle 99.9 % of the situations for a driverless car, then you end up with driverless cars stranded everywhere. I think the last step from "mostly autonomous" to "fully autonomous" is comparable to going from an ai recognizing all the objects in the famous funny Obama-scale photo, to having an au explain why it's funny. We don't even fully understand that problem, much less have any idea of how to solve it. http://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-vision/ http://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-visio...

ghaff 10y ago

Mowing a lawn is vastly easier (especially if you ignore the various edge trimming etc. that tends to be part of "mowing the lawn.") There are robot lawnmowers today though they mostly (all?) work by just using a perimeter wire like an electric dog fence which works pretty well for the small lawns these are designed for. They're basically Roombas for your lawn. They're just not very popular. They're (all?) electric which you sort of want in this application. But that means that they typically only mow up to 1/4 acre or so--which isn't a lot of work to do with just a standard mower. And they're expensive ($1K+). So you have an expensive and not very good lawnmower that can only cut lawns that are generally easy to do anyway. And, besides, if you're not very price-sensitive and don't want to cut your lawn, there's no absence of people who will do it for you and do other trimming etc. at the same time. So there's just not a lot of market for the product.